Doctor-Turned-Teacher is Reaching Students at English High

For people who survive four years of medical school—many with more than $200,000 in loans to repay—the sequence of next steps is clear. Land a residency, begin earning money, and launch a lucrative career by helping people be healthy.

But when Rebecca Lewis completed her fourth year at UMass/Worcester Medical School, she had different ideas. So she put down her stethoscope, picked up some chalk, and a year later, became a science teacher at .

The question, of course, is why.

“I love the kids,” Lewis said in Room 435 at English after teaching a section of her 11th grade Honors Chemistry class one recent morning. “In adolescent medicine, I loved working with teenagers, but I felt like you’re only seeing them every couple of months. You don’t have that level of connection that you have when you see the kids every single day. You can see your impact on them over the course of the year, which is a really amazing experience . . . and it’s a privilege as a teacher to be involved in their development that way.”

Lewis, 28, says she liked her first two years of medical school and its focus on academic content, such as anatomy studies. But during her third and fourth years, she began exploring her fascination with teaching, one dating back to her work in high school as a babysitter and as a teacher at her temple.

She undertook a teaching practicum during her fourth year that few, if any, medical students have likely attempted. Rather than teaching first-year medical students, she convinced UMass to grant her credit for being a student teacher of biology and chemistry for four months at .

“It was split right in the middle of all my rotations,” she said about her fourth-year schedule. “I loved it, and it was very clear that it was the right choice for me. I liked it so much more than anything else I had ever done.”

After leaving her medical career behind and teaching at Swansea High School for a year, Lewis began teaching at English in September 2009, a move that she saw as a dream coming true. Some of her students thought she was nuts.

“They’re like, ‘Why would you want to come here and deal with us?’ ‘I actually chose to come here and deal with you. Specifically. I want to deal with you.’ ‘And they’re like, ‘Oh. Hmm.’ It’s interesting to them.”

It’s impossible to miss Lewis’s enthusiasm and energy when she teaches. While her chemistry students worked in small groups, she visited each cluster, asking questions and listening with a calm intensity, lingering long enough to make sure her students were being heard and understood. When asked about Lewis, students spoke as enthusiastically about their teacher as she did about them.

Eleventh-grader Raphael Cox, a Jamaica Plain resident, said he’s as impressed with Lewis’s credentials as he is her teaching style. “She’s a great teacher. She never yells. She’s a real nice teacher, real friendly,” Cox said. “[Her medical training] is pretty cool. She could be a doctor but she comes back to teach.”

Tiara Cajuste, also of JP, said that being in her classes—she took Lewis’s Chemistry class after having Lewis for 10th grade Biology—has helped convince her that she wants to pursue a future as a pediatrician.

“I try to create an environment where the kids can feel comfortable and happy,” Lewis says. “I want them to be mature and take responsibility, but in this environment, I think a lot of them have never had the opportunity to really be a kid and just enjoy things. . . I try to make my classroom a really happy and energetic place where the kids feel comfortable and they look forward to coming because it’s upbeat.”

Lewis, a Lexington native, had been a contender for a position at a nearby suburban school but chose English because she wanted to be in an urban district, and found the school to be an “interesting place.”

“The kids are very genuine. They’re very real and honest and they won’t just play your game,” Lewis said. “They need to actually be inspired by you and engaged by you.”

It’s a dynamic that Lewis is grateful for, because it attracts very motivated educators.

“The teaching staff here is very dedicated and committed,” she says. “If you come to a school like English—a turnaround school, with all the changes going on—the teachers who are here have chosen to be here and have chosen to work with kids that are struggling . . . that’s something amazing about working here—the commitment of the staff and that common mission.”

Lewis’s decision a few years ago means there’s one fewer doctor in the world. But for the students of English High, Lewis’s commitment to teaching is having a healing impact they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.